Official FCC Blog

Demonstration of Innovative Accessibility Technology at FCC on Sept. 12

September 9, 2013 - 01:12 PM

Would you like to see live demonstrations about new and exciting technologies designed to enhance accessibility? The FCC will be hosting several such demonstrations in conjunction with its Accessibility and Innovation Initiative speaker series. Some of these demos will show how a smartphone can scan printed material into electronic text, how a web-browsing assistant can extract news articles for later reading, and how cloud computing can enhance accessibility for all.

At the second event in this speaker series, we are pleased to welcome guest speaker Dr. Yevgen Borodin, a renowned professor and entrepreneur, who is known for his research in the field of computational methods and non-visual interfaces for improving Web accessibility. Dr. Borodin will be discussing “Improving Accessibility for the General Public.”

Following Dr. Borodin’s presentation, there will be technological demonstrations in our Technology Experience Center (TEC) in the FCC library from 1:00pm – 3:00pm. The afternoon demos will showcase accessible technology solutions that illustrate topics of the morning’s presentation.

The following TEC demos are now scheduled:

John Carlin of Ai Squared will demonstrate ZoomReader, an iOS app, and ZoomText ImageReader, a Windows program and document camera combination. These enable optical camera recognition (OCR) of hardcopy print and reading the resulting text via speech or magnification.

Yevgen Borodin of CharmTech Labs will demonstrate Capti Narrator, a universally-designed web browsing assistant for creating a play list of articles to read, each being extracted from the main content of a web page without extraneous clutter. He will also show two products of ViewPlus Technologies: Voiceye, a system for creating and scanning informative barcodes, and IVEO, a multisensory system for interactive learning.

Patrick Timony of the DC Public Library will demonstrate accessibility features of iOS devices, showing built-in support for people with visual, hearing, dexterity or cognitive disabilities.

Gregg Vanderheiden of Raising the Floor will demonstrate the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII), a cloud-based approach for enhancing accessibility through auto-personalization of user interfaces.

This event is open to the public, and we encourage in-person attendance for the additional benefits of professional networking. The morning presentation, but not the afternoon demos, will be webcast live with open captioning at https://www.fcc.gov/live.

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